While the boys stockpiled their counterphobic fantasy objects—that is, those items of play that children gravitate toward in order to master their anxieties about someday being full grown-ups who run the world, who win—the girls were amassing theirs, in the form of Barbies, those beautiful women with “female power” who the girls hoped one day to become.

A common out come is low self-esteem, with compensatory maladaptive patterns of appeasement and overcompliance, or swaggering bravado, anxiety, and provocative, risk-taking, counterphobic, macho, aggressive behavior.